1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing HVAC systems use heat of condensation and/or heat of vaporization of a liquid, such as water, to adjust temperature and humidity within a structure such as a dwelling, building, vehicle or other region such as for a localized environment or functioning apparatus. Conventional HVAC systems can have evaporative cooling towers, which dissipate heat carried by a liquid, such as water, by evaporating a portion of the liquid.
Unfortunately, the evaporative cooling towers can be costly to maintain involving cleaning of evaporative surfaces and remedying build up of toxic salts and metals in water supplies. Other challenges are involved when attempts are made to scale down evaporative cooling towers for smaller sized applications. Often smaller scaled operations are forced to forego use of evaporative cooling towers because of size scaling issues. Consequently, efficiency of these smaller applications can suffer.
Conventional HVAC systems can also use condensing heat exchangers to remove heat from a region by condensing out a portion of a gas, such as water vapor, present in the region. The conventional condensing heat exchangers provide surface area for condensation to occur. Unfortunately, liquid already condensed on a portion of the surface can interfere with further condensation thereby hindering efficiencies.